The clouds drifted in and out for hours. Would we see it here or — as usual — would we not? See it? Not? Every minute brought different prospects.
Finally when it became clear that … well, that it was going to become clear for quite a while, I did something I haven’t done since I was a little kid bitten by an astronomy bug. I drifted a piece of glass over a candle flame until I had a two-inch blackened square and had a look.*
The moon slid in at the 2:00 o’clock position, then gradually eased across the top of the sun.
I tried to take some pictures.
They were all bad, but some were interestingly bad:
Some got more interestingly bad after a few minutes with the GIMP:
By the time the moon had moved into the 12:00 position and was heading for its exit at 10:00 o’clock, a great mass of cloud consumed the whole display.
It was all over and I never did get a good photo that captured the distinct “slice” the moon took out of the sun. (Or capture the crescent sun, to put it another way.)
But just having done something cool that I haven’t done since I was, oh, 10 or thereabouts felt great.
So how ’bout you? Did you see it? Did you get some better images than I did? Did you ignore the whole business? Did you get any fond reminders of eclipses past?
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* Yes, I know you’re not supposed to do it that way, but that whole looking at the projection of an image through a pinhole thing is borrrrring.
I knew about it. Got home from work, fiddled around a bit, then looked up a schedule for it … passing overhead almost 3 hours ago.
Well, poo!
I’ve done the pinhole viewer, but not a blackened glass or other filtration techniques.
Sorry you missed it, jed.
The blackened glass gives a wonderful, colored look without frying your eyeballs. The crescent sun flamed red-orange through the smoky black, but its outline was also very distinct.
You have to be careful to get the glass black enough, though. Welders goggles would probably do really well, but I didn’t happen to have any of those around.
Oh well, I hear there’s going to be a total solar eclipse the U.S. might get a look at in August of 2017.
Never had any desire at all to deliberately look at the sun, for any reason. Maybe comes with living most of my life in the desert. I’ve wound up looking at the sun far too much other times when it could not be avoided. Lots of neat photos taken at observatories – which can be viewed safely.
But your photos are cool too, Claire. Most look as if they were taken near a bad brush fire. 🙂
I love the Gimp. Awesome software.
Borepatch — Awesome, open source, and free! It took me a long time to get up to speed with it and even now I’m probably using only 1/10th of its capabilities. But when you look at what the GIMP offers, then look at M$ ware … wow.
I hope everybody who marvels at and uses the GIMP will send a little reward to the GIMP team.
I was driving home from the beach and noticed the eclipse was visible from the dark tinted band across the top of my new windshield. The eerie light bouncing off the clouds was even more interesting than the eclipse. I didn’t have any eclipse viewing gear so I set my camera to the fastest shutter speed, aimed it at the sky and took a few shots. I was very surprised that I actually captured an image of the eclipse.
Mari — Any place we can see your pix? Were you able to capture that “slice” effect? It was so mysteriously beautiful through darkened glass, but I couldn’t catch it with my camera.
Wanted to see the partial eclipse, but got busy dodging the tornado! Suppose I will wait for the full solar eclipse in August 2017
dsc — Egads! All things considered, I guess you’re lucky you didn’t get caught in a rain of frogs or something. 😉
My eclipse pic – first time I ever took a photo with my eyes closed.
http://www.nandina10.tumblr.com
Mari — Oh, you even got the “slice.” Neat picture. Almost abstract.
And Port Townsend! That is the best town in the whole Northwest. I love that place.
A tornado there, though? I knew WA state has had TWO tornadoes in the last couple of weeks (after having, I think, NONE for about 20 years). But in PT? I had no idea.
No tornado in PT. The tornado post was from dsc. Port Townsend has enough drama without a tornado.
Anyone know of a good GIMP plug-in for CMYK? I do stuff for commercial printing and what I’ve found for GIMP doesn’t work well. I end up doing most of my graphics work in Real World Paint (freeware; less powerful, but a lot easier on system resources) and moving it to my old Photoshop CS2 for CMYK conversion. PS also handles text better than RWP, so I tend to do that part in PS since I’m loading it anyway.
Oh, sorry about mixing up your comments and dsc’s!
But LOL on the “drama.”
So, dsc … hope you survived that tornado in style, whenever and wherever it was!
Was driving into Longview/Kelso to my favorite little yarn shop…lo & behold there was the funnel cloud!
Damn, dsc — That must have been one heck of a shock. I mean, tornadoes in western Washington? Those are as rare as honest politicians in the other Washington!